FEAST II: SLOPPY SECONDS

CONTAINS SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS AND A FAINT SENSE OF DISGUST

The first Feast movie was a perfectly adequate, perfectly acceptable B-movie which was hardly original or innovative but rattled along efficiently with plenty of gloop and slime. It had a basic setup: a bunch of disparate lowlifes in a bar, beseiged by blood-crazed monsters. Now they've made Feast II: Sloppy Seconds, and the idea is presumably to be bigger, bolder, gorier, noisier etc.

Doesn't really work, though. For a start, you know a film's gone off track a bit when they bring on a pair of wrestling midgets and some ball-bustin' badass biker chicks. An offbeat, oddball approach to character is one thing, but there's such a thing as stretching plausibility too far, even in an anything-goes horror flick. For a second thing, the ragbag of survivors are no longer in a bar miles from anywhere, but in a town: so the sensible, logical thing to do would be to get a car and just keep driving. They don't do that - even though one of their number is a used car salesman with keys to dozens of cars. Instead they hang around with the midgets and try to get into the town jail, where they'll be safer.

For a third thing, one of the group decides that they should dissect a dead monster to find out what makes it tick. Why? He's not a scientist or a doctor - he's the used car salesman's assistant. In the event he's not dissecting the monster in the name of science: he's doing it so we can have the monster fart and wee. Now, certainly farts and wee are funny - if you're five. It's a long sequence where the monster cadaver does disgusting things like spew green goo all over the midgets' granny and spurt wee in the face of one of the biker chicks. And for the fourth thing - the thing that made me the most uncomfortable - is the dead baby stuff. That's pretty much the Red Button of shock genre tropes: kill the baby for a cheap laugh. I expect that kind of thing from Troma - in amidst their usual material of deformity and rape - but Feast II is nominally a proper film and should really above lowest common denominator tactics like this.

On the other hand, there are a few funny lines, and there's enough gore and goo (although photographed in that fast-shutter style that eradicates motion blur), but it's just not as much fun as the first one, which was nothing that wonderful but did its job reasonably well. Here they're trying too hard to up the ante and it doesn't come off.

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